Leading security companies use Google Cloud to deliver Security-as-a-Service

This week, innovation in the security industry is on display as more than 700 security vendors exhibit at RSA Conference. There is no shortage of vendor solutions attempting to help organizations address the business imperative of securing users, applications, and data in today’s challenging threat and regulatory environment.

In much the way organizations have embraced cloud-delivered solutions for collaboration, data analytics, CRM and ERP, they are also turning to cloud-delivered security solutions. Many organizations have found the challenges of deploying and operating on-premises security solutions are reduced when they delivered in the cloud. These challenges are particularly acute with many next-generation security tools that require highly skilled operators, rely on large volumes of data, use high-speed analytics, and depend on continuous updates.

It’s no surprise then that many security companies have turned to public cloud providers to help deliver their newest products and services to customers. But the choice of cloud provider is a high-stakes one: finding a provider that offers reliability, performance, functionality, and above-all, foundational security, is essential. In addition to these various considerations, security companies must build and maintain trust with their provider, as they rely on protecting their reputations as “secure.”

At Google Cloud, we are proud to help numerous security companies deliver services to protect organizations around the world. Here are a few examples:

Palo Alto Networks is a global cybersecurity leader which safely enables tens of thousands of organizations and their customers, and in December 2018, we expanded our partnership. Palo Alto Networks will run Cortex on Google Cloud to take advantage of Google Cloud Platform’s secure, durable cloud storage and highly-scalable AI and analytics tools. Services such as BigQuery will help Cortex customers accelerate time-to-insight as they work to detect and respond to security threats. Palo Alto Networks will also run their GlobalProtect cloud service on Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud’s reliable, performant, and secure global-scale network and infrastructure offer many advantages for a service to help protect branch and mobile workforces.

“Being a Google Cloud customer allows us to run important cloud-delivered security services at scale with the benefits of Google’s AI and analytics expertise,” said Varun Badhwar, SVP Products & Engineering for Public Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks.

Shape Security helps organizations stop imitation attacks and ensure that only genuine customers use their websites and mobile apps. The company was looking for a scalable platform that could keep pace with the level of innovation required to stay ahead of attackers and fraudsters. Their deployment model, with appliances deployed in customer data centers, was difficult to scale and operate as their customer base grew. The answer was to transition to cloud-based service delivery.

GCP’s intuitive user management allowed them rapidly on-board users and appropriately manage permissions for developers and admins. They take advantage of GCP’s modern microservices support to provide customized, isolated environments for each customer and, similar to Palo Alto Networks, leverage GCP’s advanced data analytics services like BigQuery and support for machine learning.

“GCP’s robust support for Kubernetes and Spinnaker has made deployments significantly easier and more scalable. With Google Cloud, we have modernized our infrastructure so we can keep pace with our rapid growth.” said Andy Mayhew, Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Shape Security.

Area 1 Security is a performance-based cybersecurity company changing how businesses protect against phishing attacks. The company, through the Area 1 Horizon anti-phishing service, analyzes a vast amount of information daily using sensors across the internet, a high-speed web crawler that spiders up to eight billion URLs every few weeks, and a distributed sensor network that gathers billions of network events in a day. It sends that information to a massive data warehouse for analysis where it is processed to discover emerging and ongoing cyberattacks and then uses that insight to block phish before customers are breached. The company turned to Google Cloud Platform for its scalability, performance, and sophisticated data analytics tools.“With Google Cloud Platform, Area 1 Security has been able to identify millions of phishing attacks and malicious campaign events,” says Blake Darché, Chief Security Officer at Area 1 Security. “From reconnaissance through exfiltration, Google Cloud Platform provides us with unparalleled capabilities to discover attacks in their earliest formative stages and protect our customers.”

As a security company, Area 1 Security demanded a public cloud provider that could provide a highly secure infrastructure foundation:

“Google Cloud Platform has its own purpose-built chips, servers, storage, network, and data centers” says Phil Syme, Chief Technology Officer at Area 1 Security. “Google’s dedication to hardened security across the entire infrastructure means that Area 1 Security can trust the software that we run in Google Cloud Platform to be secure.”

BlueVoyant helps defend businesses around the world against agile and well-financed cyber attackers by providing unparalleled visibility, insight and responsiveness. Time to market is essential for providers like BlueVoyant, and Google Cloud helps them innovate quickly without compromising on security or reliability.  

"BlueVoyant chose to partner with Google Cloud because it is consistent with our security first philosophy, but also didn’t compromise on flexibility, allowing us bring our services to market faster." said Milan Patel, COO Managed Security Services, BlueVoyant.

As more security functionality is delivered through cloud-based services, Google Cloud remains deeply committed to serving this industry through a highly secure platform for security application development and delivery. To learn more, visit our Security page for Google Cloud.